Saving the Springs: Urban Expansion and Water Quality in Austin - Politics of Urban Runoff: Nature, Technology, and the Sustainable City - page 41

the genuine character of the city. However, the importance of this perspec-
tive becomes clear only when considered with respect to upstream land
development activities.
Harnessing the Colorado River
The cultural importance of the springs to Austin is equaled by the eco-
nomic importance of the Colorado River and its promise as a consistent
source of water and electricity. The river is nearly six hundred miles long,
comprising 39,900 square miles of catchment from West Texas to the Gulf
of Mexico. 20 Visitors from other regions often expect to fi nd a dry land-
scape devoid of vegetation—a stereotype of Texas portrayed in Western
movies—but the environmental conditions in Austin are strikingly dif-
ferent. The city receives a moderate thirty-two inches of rain per year on
average and the region is subjected to some of the largest fl ood-producing
storms in the continental United States. 21 It is a region with an abundance
of water, although it tends to come in short bursts rather than in regular
rainstorms throughout the year. Refl ecting on the fl ooding threats in the
city, an Austin historian notes that “if Noah had lived in Austin he would
have been much more easily persuaded to build the Ark.” 22
The challenges of settling in such a fl ood-prone area were evident in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as the municipality struggled
to protect its citizens and property from frequent and devastating storm
events. The City of Austin built its fi rst dam on the Colorado River in 1893
to generate electricity and provide fl ood control as well as a consistent
source of drinking water, but the river resisted human manipulation and
washed the dam away only seven years after completion. 23 The failure of
the dam sent the city into fi scal crisis and created an unstable environment
for economic investment; between 1900 and 1913, Austin residents suf-
fered through seventeen fl oods that caused $61.4 million in damage and
claimed the lives of sixty-one residents (see fi gure 3.5). 24
The threat of nature galvanized Austinites to adopt a Promethean ap-
proach to tame the Colorado River and create a safe and stable founda-
tion for urban development. Austin was more fortunate than other cities
in Texas, receiving the highest amount of funding from the Public Works
Administration in the 1930s for municipal construction projects. 25 Lyn-
don Baines Johnson, then a U.S. congressman, and other politicians were
instrumental in bringing New Deal projects to Central Texas, particularly
the six dams on the Colorado River that created the hundred-and-fi fty-
mile chain of water bodies known as the Highland Lakes (see table 3.1